Monthly Archives: May 2019

17 posts

“Silence Is the Weapon”

poetry

maigret

Silence. It’s said to be golden, but it’s more than that. It’s a writer’s tool. It’s a speaker’s tool. For how writers use it in interviewing, let’s listen to biographer Robert A. Caro in his paragraph-sized essay, “Tricks of the Trade” from the book Working:

“Interviews: silence is the weapon, silence and people’s need to fill it—as long as the person isn’t you, the interviewer. Two of fiction’s greatest interviewers—Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret and John le Carrés George Smiley—have little devices they use to keep themselves from talking, and let silence do its work. Maigret cleans his ever-present pipe, tapping it gently on his desk and then scraping it out until the witness breaks down and talks. Smiley takes off his eyeglasses and polishes them with the thick end of his necktie. As for myself, I have less class. When I’m waiting for the person I’m interviewing to break a silence by giving me a piece of information I want, I write ‘SU’ (for Shut Up!) in my notebook. If anyone were ever to look through my notebooks, he would find a lot of ‘SUs’ there.”

So simple, yet so difficult to do: keep quiet. Let silence do its work. And you don’t have to be an interviewer. You can be anyone trying to get anything out of anybody.

As for speakers, I give you the pause. The pregnant pause—so pregnant it’s in the third trimester. At poetry readings, a slight pause at a strategic point in a poem often does wonders for a work read aloud.

And we all know silence’s value in joke-telling. Some people are good at telling jokes, and those people all share one thing in common—a sense of timing.

They know when to wait. Pause. Shut up. Then they reap the benefits.

“The Nothing That Is…”

poetry

I write a lot of nothing here, but let’s put it more kindly: I often write how the poet’s job is to find something in nothing. As poster boy, Will Shakespeare will do. He wrote a lot of nothing, too, one pie-sized portion of it called Much Ado About Nothing.

When you think about it, every successful poem is much ado about nothing. The reason the reader relates is simple: He or she says, “Hey! I know that nothing, too!”

Man, I hate to give credit to existential viewpoints, but there’s always the sneaking suspicion that the universe is nothing but chaos, that there are no reasons to this madness, that mankind is left with the thankless job of cobbling his own useless order and code of conduct out of life, despite the mess. OK, maybe because of the mess.

No one knew better than good old Wallace Stevens. His life was a perfect example. Each day, the click-click-click of those black wingtips as he walked down the hard, shining floors of his Hartford, Connecticut, insurance company, sat behind his large polished desk, and performed his orderly job by mapping out mankind’s measurable follies for profit.

And each night when he stepped back into the windy world outside our windows? Like the Yellow Brick Road, people. Somewhere between Munchkin Land and Oz. Anything goes, from talking scarecrows to flying monkeys, because life isn’t Kansas anymore—in fact, never was.

Instead, Stevens saw a big, sprawling, populated nothing that no amount of insurance could protect us from, and if you like scary oxymorons, you might just win yourself a brief little broom of happiness and call it “a poem.”

One of my favorite examples of “nothing” as poem disguised in the charcoal eyes and carrot nose of everyday life? Wallace Stevens “The Snowman,” a perfect frozen dinner good any time of the year, warm or cold:

“The Snow Man”
by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Rereading it, you find a lot of nothings and nots, bare places and beholds. Harsh? Maybe. But, being ever the contrarian, I can rephrase it this way: What good is life if we don’t behold the stark truths around us? Between stone teeth and corncob pipe, the snowman would tell us: “Not much.”

So behold the nothingness today and make something of it. It’s all you’ve got to work with, and the sooner you accept that and put a smile on it, the sooner you’ll make sense of your world.

Weird Works

poetry writing inspiration

Sometimes, to find success in writing, an angle is in order. Sometimes that angle comes from your own unusual background. And sometimes, if your background is not terribly unusual, it comes from letting yourself go and writing the weirdly fascinating.

Weirdly fascinating can be fact or fiction. By now everyone knows how one can be as crazy as the other, so whether you are the reporter relaying truth (gussied up, as this is poetry we’re talking) or the artist amusing some Muse with your imagination, it matters not.

Weird works.

This alliterative fact of life came to mind while I was reading my June issue of The Sun. It includes a poem by Ellen Bass, a poet I’ve written about before. Ellen’s title, “Kiss,” leads one to the usual assumptions: namely, humans kissing (something they do quite well). Like Cracker Jacks, however, this poem is hiding a surprise inside. Take a look and see what I mean:

Kiss
Ellen Bass

When Lynne saw the lizard floating
in her mother-in-law’s swimming pool,
she jumped in. And when it wasn’t
breathing, its body limp as a baby
drunk on milk, she laid it on her palm
and pressed one fingertip to its silky breast
with just about the force you need
to test the ripeness of a peach, only quicker,
a brisk little push with a bit of spring in it.
Then she knelt, dripping wet in her Doc Martens
and camo T-shirt with the neck ripped out,
and bent her face to the lizard’s face,
her big plush lips to the small stiff jaw
that she’d pried apart with her opposable thumb,
and she blew a tiny puff into the lizard’s lungs.
The sun glared against the turquoise water.
What did it matter if she saved one lizard?
One lizard more or less in the world?
But she bestowed the kiss of life,
again and again, until
the lizard’s wrinkled lids peeled back,
its muscles roused its own first breath
and she set it on the hot cement,
where it rested a moment
before darting off.

Oh, man. I’m not sure I want to picture that, but it’s hard not to when the poet wields such a fine paintbrush. Kissing lizards? Well, why not, after some thought. This weirdly wonderful piece is infinitely more interesting than kissing humans, after all. If you want to be bored by that, just turn on your TV.

A Sense of Place

poetry writing writing poetry

In reading essays in Robert A. Caro’s Working, I was struck by the unanticipated similarities between fiction, nonfiction, and yes, even poetry writing. Apparently Caro was, too, else why would he write this:

“The importance of a sense of place is commonly accepted in the world of fiction; I wish that were also true about biography and history, about nonfiction in general, in fact. The overall quality, the overall level, of writing is, I believe, just as important in the one as in the other.

“By ‘a sense of place,’ I mean helping the reader to visualize the physical setting in which a book’s action is occurring; to see it clearly enough, in sufficient detail, so that he feels as if he himself were present while the action is occurring. The action thereby becomes more vivid, more real, to him, and the point the author is trying to make about the action, the significance he wants the reader to grasp, is therefore deepened as well. Because biography should not be just a collection of facts. Its base, the base of all history, of course is the facts, it’s always the facts, and you have to do your best to get them, and get them right. But once you have gotten as many of them as possible, it’s also of real importance to enable the reader to see in his mind the places in which the book’s facts are located. If a reader can visualize them for himself, then he may be able to understand things without the writer having to explain them; seeing something for yourself always makes you understand it better.

“Another point. Since places evoke emotions in people, places inevitably evoked emotions in the biographer’s subject, his protagonist. Therefore, if a biographer describes accurately enough the setting in which an action took place, and if he has accurately enough presented the protagonist’s character, the reader will be helped to understand the emotions that the setting evoked in the protagonist, and will better understand the significance that the action held for him. If the place is important enough in the subject’s life—if he was raised in it, for example, or presided over it, or maneuvered within it—if the place played a significant role in shaping his feelings, drives and motivations, his self-confidence and his insecurities, then, by making the place real to the reader, the author will have deepened the reader’s understanding of the subject, will have made the reader not just understand but empathize with him, feel with him.”

To fully appreciate the importance of bringing place to life, you need only think of your favorite subject, your particular area of expertise: yourself. What places have mattered most to you? What do they say about you? How do they reflect your concerns, interests, and fears?

One such place, surely, is your childhood stomping grounds. They reappear with regularity in your dreams, sometimes even populated with people from present circumstances.

Or your place of employment. Work long enough at a place and it begins to attach itself to you. How do you function within it? How do you make it work for you?

Not to mention (but I’m about to) your home, its surrounding grounds, its inner rooms. Walk in anyone’s house and you’ll begin to divine his or her interests. Books on the shelves. Pictures on the walls. Furniture style, cleanliness or lack thereof, colors, items on shelves and countertops, music playing, food cooking or baking in the oven, etc. Together, they fashion a composite of you.

The genre of writing matters not. Character and place are intertwined echoes of each other. For writing purposes, that means lighting, temperature, objects in place, colors, actions occurring (or not). Place can be brought to life with tricks in the writer’s toolbox shared by all genre specialists: figurative language, rhetorical devices, action verbs, specific nouns, imagery, and so on.

Try it. Write about a place only, but with a character in mind. See how much you can flesh out the man or woman just by a setting important to him/her. You’ll see that Robert Caro, biographer, was on to something. More than he knew….

Poets? They Know Godot!

blathering comma mine humor poetry

godot

Though few of us have seen it, Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot is familiar to us all. It’s a play about nothing. Two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait for someone named Godot (note the surprise inside, the word “God”), only instead of someone they get no one. And a lot of waiting. Thus talking. Thus a play about waiting. And talking.

Circles, anyone? And why does the plot of Waiting for Godot remind me of the life of a poet? Let me make like Barrett Browning and count the ways.

Poets do a lot of waiting. First and foremost, for the inspiration of ideas. Second, for the “time” to write (or so they say, as they check their cell phone for the umpteenth time in the past ten minutes). And third for the discipline to write and then revise (wait for it) over and over and over and over and over again.

All of this waiting allows the poet to play Vladimir or Estragon all he wants. In lines and stanzas, if he wishes. A sonnet, if he’s playful. Haiku will do if he’s in his briefs.

But then comes more waiting. After due diligence the poems (usually in sets of five, usually in exchange for a reading fee to keep a poetry journal afloat) are turned loose on the reading world.

Response time? Surely Godot will know! If it says three months, figure six. If it says six, figure a year. If it says nine (It’s a boy! No, it’s a girl!), you may never hear back.

Keep records all you want, but keep a duster, too, so you can feather off the dates and scratch your waiting head.

There are other ways poets know Godot, I fear. Sometimes they share their poetry with other poets for criticism. Sometimes these poems are yet unpublished. Sometimes these poems are not only already published but in book form.

Nevertheless, engaging in such foolishness—especially with a poet who is more “established” (a relative term, like “uncle” and “Grandma”) than you—is just asking for the Godot treatment. Promises, after all, are the waiting experts (or so it says in their ad).

Such is the way of the world, friends. Which means? Beckett nailed it, and I can’t wait to see his play some day. And when I do, I’ll go into full solipsist mode, shouting, “Hey! It’s true! This is a play about me!”

Then I’ll look in the mirror. And see Godot.

The Benefits of Laziness

poetry writing inspiration

hammock

Whether you are Protestant or not, you’ve probably fallen victim to that “Protestant work ethic” thing. You know. The one where, as a kid, your parents or teachers or other adults berated you for being L-A-Z-Why Not. The one where, as an adult, your spouse, your friends, or your boss take over.

Please. How do they expect you to daydream? To ruminate? To wonder? To cut to the quick, how do they expect you to create?

Just because the body is doing nothing doesn’t mean the brain is lying fallow. In fact, the brain sometimes does 100 push-ups with one arm best when the body is at rest. The Chinese call it wu wei, which means “non-acting” or “non-doing” or, if you must, “acting without purpose,” all of which undercut what’s actually going on.

I mean, really. Unless you’re dead, something’s always going on upstairs, praise be. Writing doesn’t come in two days from Amazon, after all. Or from a pill, either.

It’s all on you. And though writing itself may be deemed “action,” the necessary first step is ideas—ideas that make you shout (like you discovered it), “Wu wei, this is fun!” because you’re doing a whole lot of “nothing” (accent on quotation marks, thank you) in style.

Raymond Carver knew. He was of the brotherhood. Read “Loafing” below and see what I mean. Yep. One of us!

Loafing
Raymond Carver

I looked into the room a moment ago,
and this is what I saw —
my chair in its place by the window,
the book turned facedown on the table.
And on the sill, the cigarette
left burning in its ashtray.
Malingerer! my uncle yelled at me
so long ago. He was right.
I’ve set aside time today,
same as every day,
for doing nothing at all.

When the News Kills the Muse

poetry writing writing inspiration writing poetry

news

Sometimes it feels like you’re faced with an everyday dilemma of rock or hard place, devil or deep blue sea, Scylla or Charybdis. You know what I’m talking about: poetry or citizenship.

A steady diet of the news, it seems, is good for becoming an informed citizen (something all countries of the world need today, but especially the Disunited States), but not so good for creativity.

So what, then? Be selfishly artistic by ignoring newspapers, magazines, and all news media in general? Seek your Muse in the sand, ostrich-like?

Sounds appealing, I’ll admit! I say this only after reading in the New York Times that the Environmental Protection Agency (which no longer protects anything but corporate interests) is changing the math on air pollution effects on the populace with the goal of reducing projected number of total deaths.. Get it? Rules are relaxed, air pollution and pulmonary-related deaths go up, but reported deaths go down (and math is a wonderful thing).

Or how about the bacterial scourge that has struck citrus farmers in the southeastern U.S.? You have to feel for these farmers because it’s their livelihood, but the solution of treating crops destined for people with antibiotic spray (also approved by the E.P.A.) has raised all manner of alarms with health experts and scientists who are already watching killer “superbugs” rise in numbers due to a world awash in irresponsible application and distribution of antibiotics—to people, to animals, and now to plants.

Reading material like this is like a cold shower on the poetic mood. You feel more anger and despair than inspiration. Europe and Brazil have laws protecting their citizens from antibiotic spraying of crops, but I guess their governments are for the people vs. for the corporations. Make America Corporate Again (MACA). Teapot Dome and Tammany Hall are back, like the backwater infiltrating the late, great, supposedly drained swamp.

Which brings us back to the premise: Is a well-versed citizen abreast of the news and hopefully active in doing something about it antithetical to a creatively inspired artist? Not necessarily. Let’s not forget our old friend satire (it once lived in pens but is amenable to keyboards, too). Read some Voltaire. Sip some Mark Twain. These guys had little use for the powers-that-be and their timeless greed for power and money. They showed it through sharp, critical humor, relying on the pen in a world enamored of the sword.

One outlet I can recommend to activist artists is Rattle‘s Poet’s Respond feature. Every week, they set a Friday midnight (Pacific time) deadline for poems paired to something in the news.

Better yet? They’ll pay for it. Better yet than better yet? You’ll get a response by Sunday. That’s right: a 48-hour turnaround on poetry submissions. For writers, this is akin to partings of the Red Sea (only in this case, it’s the “Read Sea”).

What’s not to like? To arms, citizen poets! You can have your news cake and write it, too!

Breaking the Rules

humor poetry reading poetry

Rules for writing, poetry or otherwise, are as plentiful as mosquitoes during a wet July. One such dictum, come down from Moses, it would appear, is never to use clichés. For one, you’ll have to remember how to get an accent aigu on the screen. And for another, you’ll be considered a lazy writer using lazy phrases in a lazy way.

Unless, of course, you want to break the rules. Purposely. With panache. Isn’t that what rules are for? Breakage? Run-arounds? Clears and dig-unders?

Surely that’s what the poet Ronald Wallace had in mind when he composed the following ode (of sorts) to clichés:

Blessings

occur.
Some days I find myself
putting my foot in
the same stream twice;
leading a horse to water
and making him drink.
I have a clue.
I can see the forest
for the trees.

All around me people
are making silk purses
out of sows’ ears,
getting blood from turnips,
building Rome in a day.
There’s a business
like show business.
There’s something new
under the sun.

Some days misery
no longer loves company;
it puts itself out of its.
There’s rest for the weary.
There’s turning back.
There are guarantees.
I can be serious.
I can mean that.
You can quite
put your finger on it.

Some days I know
I am long for this world.
I can go home again.
And when I go
I can
take it with me.

And take it with him, Wallace did, fashioning success from mistakes connected elephant trunk to elephant tail, start to finish.

What a great lesson. Creativity über alles once more (even when you have to remember how to get an umlaut on the screen).

Phrases and Clauses and Words, Oh My!

poetry reading poetry

Syntax. It sounds like a levy the government collects on bad habits: smoking, drinking, voting for radical leftwing socialists who care more about people than corporations.

But, no. Syntax, accord to Merriam, Webster, and their Indian maiden friend Sacagawea, is “a: the way in which linguistic elements (such as words) are put together to form constituents (such as phrases or clauses), b: the part of grammar dealing with this.”

And though we might frequently forget the meaning of syntax, we all use it each time we put pen to paper or key to screen. Voila! With our eyes closed and our throat humming “Camptown Races,” we produce not only phrases but clauses (take that, Santa)! Who says actions speak louder than words? Try syntax without them!

Anyway, all this throat clearing is by way of introducing a short Ron Padgett poem inspired by (wait for it…) syntax! You heard me. Grammar. A topic as dry as drought-time wheat. Further proof that anything can inspire poetry, in the right hands choreographed by the right brain. To wit:

Syntactical Structures
Ron Padgett

It was as if
while I was driving down a one-lane dirt road
with tall pines on both sides
the landscape had a syntax
similar to that of our language
and as I moved along
a long sentence was being spoken
on the right and another on the left
and I thought
Maybe the landscape
can understand what I say too.
Ahead was a farmhouse
with children playing near the road
so I slowed down
and waved to them.
They were young enough
to smile and wave back.

You might think a poetry prompt called “syntax” would be a nonstarter, but you would be wrong. Why? Because you probably forgot about the metaphors jangling around in your satchel. See how quickly (Line 4) Padgett takes syntax and fashions from it a landscape.

Landscape as a prompt, you say? Easy peasy. And just like that, Padgett’s off to the races with 17 lines ending with a lighthearted take on kids and innocence in a world distrustful of both.

Not bad for a day’s syntaxing, wouldn’t you say?

Inspired by Water: One If By Lake, Two If By Sea

poetry reading poetry writing inspiration writing poetry

Vacation. For students, its special meaning lies in summer, the granddaddy of all vacations. For adults, however, it’s more narrow. Most full-time workers enjoy but 2 to 4 weeks of paid vacation each year. Compared to the nine-week wonder of childhood, slim provisions indeed.

Conjuring vacations of your childhood is sure to bring back a host of disparate memories. You’ll remember some close to home. You’ll recall a few long-distance car rides. And, if you’re lucky, you might reminisce about a certain long flight to some exotic location.

As fodder for writing, vacations are fertile ground. Water figures largely. Melville-like, we are drawn to the sea (it says so in Moby-Dick, after all). And E.B. White-like, we are drawn to the lakes (check out his beautiful essay, “Once More to the Lake”).

Marge Piercy uses lake vacations for material in her aptly-titled poem below. You can, too, by writing down the memories and the imagery that come to mind when you think of a childhood vacation. Once that’s done, you reach the “If you write it, they will come” phase, wherein metaphors come marching out of the water to give your draft some substance.

Here’s inspiration, Piercy’s last draft:

The Rented Lakes of My Childhood
Marge Piercy

I remember the lakes of my Michigan
childhood. Here they are called ponds.
Lakes belonged to summer, two-week
vacations that my father was granted by
Westinghouse when we rented some cabin.

Never mind the dishes with spiderweb
cracks, the crooked aluminum sauce
pans, the crusted black frying pans.
Never mind the mattresses shaped
like the letter V. Old jangling springs.

Moldy bathrooms. Low ceilings
that leaked. The lakes were mysteries
of sand and filmy weeds and minnows
flickering through my fingers. I rowed
into freedom. Alone on the water

that freckled into small ripples,
that raised its hackles in storms,
that lay glassy at twilight reflecting
the sunset then sucking up the dark,
I was unobserved as the quiet doe

coming with her fauns to drink
on the opposite shore. I let the row-
boat drift as the current pleased, lying
faceup like a photographer’s plate
the rising moon turned to a ghost.

And though the voices called me
back to the rented space we shared
I was sure I left my real self there—
a tiny black pupil in the immense
eye of a silver pool of silence.

I’m sure the Michigan lakes of Piercy lore are the same as the New Hampshire and Maine lakes of Craft lore. Lake or ocean, water is unique yet universal, a perfect brew for the inspiration-sipping writer.

Notice the imagery Piercy uses in stanzas 2 through 5, some of them indoor images, others outdoor. Notice, too, how it sets up the grand finale at the end. Like Fourth of July fireworks, endings often riff off concrete goods to offer an abstract bang. Here it comes in the form of metaphor, the narrator as a pupil (double meaning!) in the “eye of a silver pool of silence.”

So nice. So lake-like. A meditation compliments of the silently-lovely past.